Anthropology Professor Organizes Workshop on Colombia’s Changing View of Its History

Les Field, UNM Pro­fes­sor of Anthropology

UNM Pro­fes­sor of Anthro­pol­ogy Les Field and a col­league Cristo­bal Gnecco, pro­fes­sor, Depart­ment of Anthro­pol­ogy, Uni­ver­si­dad del Cauca in Colom­bia, have orga­nized an inter­na­tional pro­fes­sional event in Colom­bia titled, “Illicit Exca­va­tion, Archae­ol­ogy, Com­mu­ni­ties and Muse­ums: An Inter­na­tional Work­shop on Com­plex Rela­tion­ships and Future Per­spec­tives.”  The work­shop will be held Jan­u­ary 27 – 29 at the Uni­ver­si­dad Del Cauca in Bogota, Colombia.

The pur­pose will be to dis­cuss the com­plex rela­tion­ships between illicit exca­va­tion of and trade in his­toric arti­facts, archae­ol­ogy, and muse­ums and to explore ways local com­mu­ni­ties near exca­va­tion can medi­ate trade in, knowl­edge about and inter­pre­ta­tion of the arti­facts.  Renowned schol­ars from seven coun­tries will dis­cuss the prob­lem with a spe­cific focus on Colom­bia with par­tic­i­pat­ing Colom­bian scholars.

The group will travel to the Museo Del Oro (the Gold Museum) dur­ing one day of the con­fer­ence.  That is some­thing Field is par­tic­u­larly inter­ested in because it houses the his­tory of Colom­bia in gold through a vari­ety of arti­facts.  “The trea­sures there are prob­a­bly the most stun­ning gold work ever done in the Amer­i­cas,” Field said.

Field has worked in Colom­bia for more than 20 years. Initially, he worked in agri­cul­tural devel­op­ment, but he has always been riv­eted by the pre-Columbian her­itage of the coun­try.  Farm­ers he worked with were find­ing arti­facts in their fields and had their own inter­pre­ta­tion of the past and the mean­ing of the objects.  Field had to leave Colom­bia for years because of the drug related vio­lence in the coun­try, but was able to return in 2005.

When he returned to the area north of Calí, he learned what had hap­pened in his absence.  In the early 1990’s a sugar cane worker was plow­ing a field when he looked back at his work and saw gold arti­facts com­ing out of the ground.  Field says within two days, there were thou­sands of peo­ple dig­ging in the field, look­ing for gold objects.  He said it cre­ated a social con­vul­sion in that part of the country.

He knew imme­di­ately that this was a ter­rif­i­cally impor­tant story for a cul­tural anthro­pol­o­gist to explore.  The gov­ern­ment had made an effort through­out the 20^th cen­tury to pro­mote the Museo Del Oro and to encour­age Colom­bians to think of that as their her­itage.  But the dis­cov­ery  and mass loot­ing of pre-Columbian gold arti­facts in a field in the 1990’s sug­gested that those efforts had not nec­es­sar­ily cre­ated that sensibility.

Field worked in Colom­bia from 2007 through 2010 on the project funded by a Ful­bright Fellowship. He has writ­ten an arti­cle “The Gold Sys­tem:  Explo­rations of the Ongo­ing Fate of Colombia’s pre-Columbian Gold Arti­facts” for the Colom­bian anthro­pol­ogy jour­nal “Antipode” and will sub­mit an updated ver­sion of that text to an anthro­pol­ogy jour­nal in the U.S. as well. He is cur­rently work­ing with a num­ber of Colom­bian anthro­pol­o­gists in his research into the his­tory of the gold find and the way that the coun­try dis­cusses its own history.

The con­fer­ence is funded by the Wenner-Gren Foun­da­tion for Anthro­po­log­i­cal Research, Inc. along with Uni­ver­si­dad de los Andes in Bogota, Colum­bia, Insti­tuto Colom­biano de Antropolo­gia y His­to­ria Nacional and the Fun­da­cion de Inves­ti­ga­cions Arque­o­log­i­cas Nacionales (Colombia).

Con­fer­ence atten­dees have all writ­ten papers to share and dis­cuss.  They plan to pub­lish the papers in col­lab­o­ra­tion as a book in the future.

Media con­tact: Karen Went­worth; e-mail: kwent2@unm.edu